Dragoș Bădiță – Light Falls

From February 3rd to March 17th, 2017, Anca Poterașu Gallery presented the solo show Light Falls by Cluj-Napoca based artist Dragoș Bădiță, who is also co-coordinator of Lateral ArtSpace.

The exhibition, curated by Cristina Stoenescu, gravitates around the idea that “seeing is also blindness”. The human eye, the primary organ we rely on to explore and understand reality, is fragile and vulnerable – too much light may burn it, while darkness obscures vision. Even a simple inversion of colors has the power to change the way we relate to what we see, blurring meanings once so clear.

In a separate room, the video installation Vertigo – circling a tree during day time yet projecting this repetitive action as if happening during the night – further reveals the limits of our visual perception. On a wall, in the same room, is the drawing of a man trying to escape the absence of light, a work that evokes isolation, captivity and anxiety.

Moving forward to the final room we discover the Icelandic experience, a collection of minimalist monochromatic ink on paper artworks showing landscapes of unearthly beauty and haunting silence, some depicted with photographic precision, others appearing to spring from the memory of witnessing something never seen before. Melancholia governs the space where echos from the artist’s childhood mix with the remembrance of his residency in the Nordic island.

As we leave the gallery and the light falls on the busy streets of the city, the image of the inverse trees remains.

Dragoș Bădiță – Meditation on perception

An ongoing research about visual perception, the way it is embodied, enacted and actually felt in direct experience. It explores phenomena like visual illusions, blindness, eye anatomy, the mechanics of camera obscura, color biases, the emotional effect of light, pareidolia, the search for familiar visual cues, etc. The goal is to make visible these mechanisms and to make the viewer intimately connected with the perceptual world of the other.

(Text via the artist’s website)

Flame, 2016, oil on paper, 50 x 65 cm

Eye, 2016, oil on paper, 50 x 65 cm

Sungazing, 2015, oil on paper, 50 x 65 cm

Inversion, 2015, oil on paper, 50 x 65 cm

Dragoș Bădiță – Other works

The exhibition space is flooded at the beginning with referential images, only to later be abandoned to a warm and vibrant darkness. The transitions from diffuse lighting to the lack of thereof, from the burning clarity of an image projected unto blue pigment to flowing ink on paper, make the pupil contract, or loosen its grip in the search of visual details.From the Icelandic landscapes to the sky mirrored in still water, the artworks move between alienation and melancholia, between embracing and letting go, between pre-conditioned perception and monochrome clarity.

(Excerpt text, by curator Cristina Stoenescu)

Iceland series, ink paintings created during the artist’s residency at the Fjuk Art Centre in Husavik, Iceland in 2015.